Irby warned drafters against over-correcting for Underdog’s reinstated regular-season bonuses. In his simplified model, the 14-game first round represents only one quarter of tournament equity, meaning any single regular-season week contributes just 1.8 % of an entry’s value. He contrasted this with the 25 % weight of Week 17 alone and the sharply tiered payouts that make a six-figure top-15 finish the true EV driver. Because the average max-entering user reaches the Finals once every 8.3 seasons, Irby argued that spending premium picks on high-floor, front-loaded production—or forcing Week-1 matchup mini-correlations—provides little return relative to pursuing spike-week profiles that can win small advance-rate pods and then erupt when the money is meaningful. His takeaway: target players and constructions whose scoring skews late, even if it means sacrificing a few projected regular-season points.

Mat Irby said drafters should continue to prioritize Week 17 game-stack correlation in Best Ball Mania VI. Using the contest’s posted payout table, Irby calculated that a single Week 17 Finals score now carries 36.6 % of an entry’s total expected value—greater than the entire 14-week regular season (27.2 %) and even larger than the combined value of Weeks 15 and 16 (36.1 %). He reminded readers that Michael Leone’s 2023 data showed a ~50 % boost in Finals win probability for correlated Week 17 stacks and noted Pat Kerrane’s $2 million lineup as a real-world example. Because Irby’s EV math weights each earlier round by its conditional advance rate, he argued that the incremental upside of hitting a top-heavy Week 17 payout dwarfs the opportunity cost of minor structural “mistakes” made to reach the Finals, making correlation and back-loaded upside the biggest edge in today’s format.